I do search from openai app with search option tunred on. It has better filtering than Google which shows all the irrelevant and low quality links like fake news as well.
Quality of the search matter. Google does not have a way for me to mark what all websites i don't want in my search results so we need to rely on a more authentic source to filter all the chaos on the internet.
Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
541–550 of 609 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#542Yes, I do. I'd never use an LLM for any meaningful or important information because by design, they will simply shove the most likely next token and you get a ton of responses which are pure nonsense if you start digging into it. Mind you, I've been noticing that Google has been terrible for a long while now. Kagi seemed alright at first but it also gave a lot of nonsense. The final straw for Kagi was the fact that t…
I've just recently switched to Qwant from Google. It serves all my purposes perfectly, except for programming queries unfortunately. Google seems to be better at bringing up a variety of stackoverflow and blogposts relevant to my search queries. Qwant seems to struggle exactly with that: it's great at giving exactly what I was searching for but that's sometimes not what I was looking for, if you get what I mean. In a…
Qwant has been reasonably good with programming for me though or maybe I'm more commonly going straight to the documentation or source code, idk. My only complaint is that wikipedia tends to be pretty far down in the results for non-programming questions. LLMs(all of them) have been terrible with programming questions too. Imaginary APIs, leaks, code that outright breaks your data, you name it. Oh and don't get me started on optimization and performance(which is ultimately one of my main concerns on day to day basis). They are absolutely horrible.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#543Yes, I'm still using Google as I haven't found LLMs useful as a search engine replacement.
but the AI responses from google that dominate the screen real estate are terrible. When you repeat the exact same query and get changing (but all wrong) answers, something is broken. I've resorted to including profanity in all my searches to prevent the AI responses, which is suboptimal at work...
I'm using the udm14 extension in Firefox to hide those.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#544ChatGPT takes 5-10 seconds to respond. Until it's as fast as google, i'm not switching.
The question is: are you searching for answers to something, or are you searching for a site/article/journal/whatever in order to consume the actual content? If you are searching for a page/article/journal/ in order to find an answer, then the journal/article itself was just a detour, if the LLM could give you the answer and you could trust it. But if you were looking for the page/article itself, not some piece of information IN the article then ChatGPT can (at best) give you the same URL google did, but 100x slower?
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#545I use CoPilot that is build into Windows 11 now almost exclusively. It's right there and gets the job done 99.9% of the time for me. that other 0.1% is when I use google.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#546I try to use Google. If I put my search question into the Android Firefox url bar and hit enter, Google will show up with some useful answers (if it's not in the AI answer, Google is useless, because there are 5 pages of bullshit before it begins to show me actual web page search results).
But if I then click the Google search text box at the top, and start typing, it takes 20 seconds for my text to start appearing (the screen is clearly lagged by whatever Google is doing in the background), and then somehow it starts getting jumbled. Google is the only web page this happens to.
I actually like their results, they just don't want me to see their results. Weird business model.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#547I use DuckDuckGo mostly, but have a Kagi subscription for other searches.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#548I was primarily using ChatGPT & Perplexity.
Then I started calling B.S. on them, and more often than not their replies were "You're right! Sorry about that!"
Simply saying "that's wrong" reveals a terrifying amount of "hallucination" by AI. Far, far more answers stated confidently as fact, turned out to be completely made up.
If I want to play with ideas, I chat with AI. If I need facts, I use search.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#549AFAICT ChatGPT is mostly useless and can't be trusted to answer questions accurately. So no, mostly all search engines. To be honesty I'm surprised anybody uses it for anything other than trivial uses.
Search engines aren't accurate either, they show you 10,000+ pages for your search query. You probably weren't looking for 10,000 answers. The problem is, they can't read your mind. ChatGPT can show you results you want, just like search engines can, you just may have to tweak your query.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#550No, I find it unwilling to produce factual information. For example Jeep consistently lands at the bottom of the reliability ratings. Try asking GPT if Jeeps are reliable. The response reads like Jeep advertising.
Instead ask it to show you links to websites that review reliability ratings and highlight the results for Jeeps along with sources. It's annoying, but how you ask it questions is often more important than what you're asking. (This was a thing when search engines were first introduced too)